Landscaping and bringing ornamental grasses into our garden plantings have been a growing trend both locally and internationally. In a small townhouse garden, just a grouping of as little as three grasses, to a large garden with mass plantings of thirty to fifty grasses, the interest is the same.
Whether you have a Minimalist, Indigenous, French, English or Mediterranean style garden, grasses will enhance and blend in perfectly with your home and landscape. This is where colour in the form of low and tall perennials – planted amongst the grass plantings to break the possible hardness of grass plantings – come in.
On their own grass plantings can be very hard on the eye and it is apparent that these plantings need to be softened. Try planting a group of the same colour perennials amongst your grass plantings, i.e. perennials like Guara, Bearded Irises, Coreopsis, Campanula, Rudbeckia, Cherianthus, Limonium and Astibles. The preferable height of your newly introduced colour ‘grass breakers’ should be just under a meter. Depending upon their habits of growth and water conditions, they should be planted in groups from three to a dozen or more. The smaller borders would naturally have smaller groups.
Our Favourite Ornamental Grasses:
- Carex comans – Frosted Curls.
- Carex hachijoensis “Evergold” – Variegated Japanese Sedge.
- Festuca glauca – Blue fescue.
- Liriope muscari “Silver Ribbon” – Lillyturf variety.
- Liriope muscari “Evergreen Giant” – Lilyturf variety.
- Ophiopogon jaburan – Mondo Grass variety.
- Ophiopogon japonicas “Kyoto” – Short Mondo Grass variety.
